To western audiences, it’s a game called chicken usually played in the swimming pool. Girls perch on top of boy’s shoulders and try to knock the other team over. In rural Turkey, it is seen as girls pleasuring themselves against the backs of boy’s necks, an overt sign of sin and immorality. To isolated town elders, it is proof the girls cannot be virgins. To the hospital! Virginity checks all around! Mustang is Turkish-French director Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s slightly autobiographical story about her experiences as a young girl in Turkey. It’s a not so sly middle finger aimed at Turkey’s recent lurch to the conservative right under the AKP party’s propaganda machine about a woman’s place in society.

Perception is reality in small, isolated towns. If a nosy neighbor tattles on you for immorality, then imagine what else you must be up to. Mustang’s five orphan girls live together under the watchful eyes of their grandmother, a couple aunts, and the unsettling eye of their a bit too long-gazing uncle. The girls are a single unit. They lie on the floor in a knot poking fun at each other and laughing about the backwardness of their circumstances. After the chicken fighting incident, they are denied further education at school and their punishment is a home turned into a prison.

The girls lose their phones, the computer, and must dress like rural housewives in what young Lale (Günes Sensoy) calls “shit-colored clothes”. Cooking and sewing lessons are endured and in a first-person narrative, Lale describes the house as a wife factory as her older sisters are one-by-one married off to bachelors they’ve been introduced to only minutes before. Lale wryly observes, “One minute we were fine, then everything turned to shit.”

I watched Mustang with dread knowing events were going to cascade downhill for the girls. One gets the sense the girls real sin was not frolicking with boys, it was merely the excuse the patriarchal culture was eagerly waiting for so those in authority could begin stamping out the excited, independent spirits into lowered eyes and tea tray holders.

Echoes of Flowers in the Attic and The Virgin Suicides are present in Mustang but Ergüven steers clear of the horror possibilities of the Attic in favor of realism. Ergüven embraces understanding of a close-knit group of girls far better than Sofia Coppola’s Virgin Suicides. Mustang was filmed in Turkey and the dialogue is in Turkish, yet it is France’s Oscar nominee as Best Foreign Film. If you are familiar with Turkey’s secular past and how close the country used to hew to western values of gender equality, it it disheartening to see contemporary Turkish society lurch backwards in favor of oppression and stagnation. Mustang is a sign Ergüven is a new, fresh voice in dramatic household narratives. I can’t wait to see what she comes up with next.